Sam Wallman, judge for Fair Australia Prize – Cartoon/graphic

‘Stop Calling Bigots Bogans’ by Scott Arthurson: Throughout ashtrayan history, most of the big wins the Left has successfully fought have been thanks to the organising of working-class people. And yet, a lot of young people dismiss the working class as bogans. A lot of the working class dismiss young people as hipsters. And never the two shall meet.

‘Why the Rich Love Burning Man’ by Keith A Spencer: There are a lot of optical illusions these days, lots of individualistic movements presenting themselves with an aesthetic of radicalism. None of them seem to address structural issues. Burning Man festival is number one on my list of left-wing mirages, followed by Uber’s free bottle of water for every passenger (paid for by the driver). Much agile. So innovate.

‘The Case Against Sharing’: Susie Cagle produces the best comics-journalism on planet earth. This is a graphic essay that’s a couple of years old, a neat critique of the ‘sharing economy’.

‘Unpaid Internships Must Be Destroyed’: Matt Bors somehow simultaneously makes insecure and precarious work seem like a ginormous and horrific monolith, but also energises and mobilises you to want to fight and oranise against it.

‘Why we Fight Uber’: Jacobin is good at publishing work that is really accessible, without being reductive.

Jacinda Woodhead, judge for Fair Australia Prize – Essay

If you’re in Melbourne tonight, there’s the launch of the short documentary, The women who were never there, about the anti-discrimination campaign against BHP. At Victorian Trades Hall from 6.30pm.

The screening makes me think of the superb filmic depictions of struggle and labour activism I’ve seen over the past couple of years – Death in Sarajevo(which screened just last week at MIFF); Two Days, One Night; A Touch of Sin; Pride.

It’s a little older but Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony, available on YouTube, documents the anti-apartheid movement, and how critical music was to that struggle.

While on the subject of South Africa, I’d also recommend Sisonke Msimang’s essay in our latest issue, ‘End of the rainbow’, which documents the rise of the Fallists, whose protests shut down all of South Africa’s twenty-six universities last year. And while still in South Africa, District 9is a fantastic film about resistance (and far superior to Independence Day or its resurgence).

There are $4000 prizes in the categories of fiction, essay, poetry and cartoon/graphic that explore the themes of fairness and our common future.

*How do we make a fair society? What are the things that need to change?
*What would a sustainable future or a just justice system look like?
*How can we improve labour or employment practices?
*What might a fairer planet look like in twenty years?

Comments

For the record, ‘On the Waterfront’ was directed by Elia Kazan, who ‘named names’ before the House Committee on un-American Activities and got a bunch of his former friends and comrades blacklisted from the motion picture industry. The film itself is a meditation on the virtues of informing; Marlon Brando’s famous line ‘I could have been a contender’ arguably attempts to apologise for and excuse Kazan’s own conduct by drawing an entirely false analogy between the mafia and the communist party.

On the Waterfront is made out to be this grand achievement but actually it’s little better than McCarthyist propaganda.

That is certainly one reading. But there has been an incredibly problematic relationship between politics and Hollywood since the industry’s inception – a profit-driven institution like that is hardly going to be on the side of the Left, even when the Left is inside it. But that doesn’t mean there’s ever a singular reading of a film.

The mafia and communism analogy is an interesting one, because the FBI and the mafia were the two worst things that ever happened to the US union movement.

The profit-driven nature of Hollywood per se is a given; opposing the introduction of a Show Trial to ferret out crimethink in the cultural beacon of the western world by sending out suboenas to writers, directors and actors preidentified by Hoover’s FBI as not sufficiently right wing hardly equates to a demand to defend the autocratic hiearchies inherent to capitalist relations of production. Nor does it excuse ratting out your friends to the local inquisiton. Too many lefties seem to imagine otherwise.

The mafia thing is pure projection; in terms of rackets, the mafia were to the reign of J. Edgar Hoover what Nigerian email scams are to neoliberalism.